The Open Book_

Monday, August 6, 2012

Hmmm... Do you want it? You don't know. Nobody around seem to have it. You don't care. But hey, he has it. He also has it. You were wrong. Everyone seems to be trying, they just didn't tell you. But none of your friends have it. So, its ok. But you decide to try anyways. You try, you fail. But hey, you tried. Life changed, people changed, you didn't. You are a little old. No, not old - just matured. It happens again. You didn't try, it just happened. Is it for real? Of course, not. It screws up, miserably. Life gives you lemons, big ones... Its frustrating. Why can't it just go as per plan. Its just your plan, you don't control life. Its more frustrating. Your friends still don't seem to have it. Your friends are useless. You give up. But you secretly wish you didn't. Calm down, if its meant to be, it will be. Where is all that maturity? Its all going to be worth the wait, your friends tell you. Its all going to be worth the wait, you tell yourself. You blame it on fate.You blame it on quarter life crisis. You blame it on the unsuspecting beggar you met in that obscure temple you visited 3 years ago. Still, that doesn't change the status quo. Somehow you find yourself almost there. But wait, this is not where you wanted to be. Back to square one. This time you truly give up. And finally, it happens. This time for real. From what it looks like, this could very well be worth the wait. Here is to welcoming 'T' into this blog...

Monday, September 19, 2011

Change is good, but not so good. Our lives are merely an unending sequence of uncontrollable changes silently unfolding before our eyes when we were busy continually trying to control the change or change the control. At times, the most comforting thing in the world is to see something and think, "Ha! Things have not changed and I don't have to do anything about it". That forlorn feeling, that forgotten connection, that unbreakable thread, that unmistakable connection between your life that was and the life that is, is sufficient to take you mentally back all those years and force a grin on your face even if you are skipping lunch and working late on an eventually inconsequential task.

One of my friends used to say long time back, "You don't like Madras. You either love it or not". True that. Beyond the madness and the rush, the city does exude a very subtle romance that is felt only by someone who is in love with it. This city still has so many things intact that can make me harp on and on about it.

Dear Madras, you have grown bigger than I had known, you may have become sufficiently cosmopolitan, auto drivers may have started to talk Hindi, mini skirts may no longer be applicable to the '5-12 ages' group, multinational companies may call you their home, those multinationals may also install Italian coffee machines in their pantries, but, they can't change you! Only in Chennai will you see this.

Let the Cappuccinos and the Lattes enjoy the pleasurable company of a quintessential South Indian Coffee-Strong. Let them go back to the world and narrate how awesome the South Indian Coffee-Strong feels, especially to someone who calls Madras a home and is struggling to find foot in his life! Love you, my dear Madras.

Monday, March 14, 2011

I am in Chennai! I AM IN CHENNAI! I am in Chennai! It is has been a few weeks since I landed in Chennai but have been busy. Seriously. Life is good and I don't know what else to say. On this blog, what better way to celebrate my recent relocation to Sambhar land other than restarting the forgotten series on Tamil serials? Here we go, this post is on the most important aspect on which the Tamil serial rides, confusion. You might not have noticed the kind of confusion I am talking about. It needs some guts made of steel and some Himalayan patience to sit through several consecutive episodes, take notes, and then make sense of them! Please remember that I have been through some life threatening circumstances when I was observing that monster from close quarters with a notepad and pen in hand. Appreciate it...

There is A. There is B. A is married to B. A has three siblings - C, D and E. B has two siblings - F and G. C, D, E, F and G are assigned random genders but it helps to be have a majority of females. Since A is married to B, it is a high probability that F is married to D! C is married to H, an outsider to the original family. G is most probably a male and is currently unmarried. A and B have a couple of kids, I and J. D and F also have a couple of kids, K, L and M. G is in love with J and she knows that. Their families have agreed to that. But K is elder to J and she wants to marry G.

I is the most undereducated in the family and he married someone, N, commensurate to his status and they have a kid O. Then there is this guy, P, who is sincerely in love with J and she knows that. P also has absolutely no chance of landing J, and she knows that as well but doesn't seem to do anything about that! 99% of the time P has a really sick and slowly dying mother, Q.

L and R are sincerely in love with each other. As if one more twist is required in this story, S wants to desperately marry L and her brother T wants his sister M. Needless to mention, R is excruciatingly poor and S is outrageously rich. L has a group of friends - U and V. V also loves R, in spite of knowing that she loves his friend L.U know it, but deems it absolutely unnecessary to discuss this trivial issue with L. R has a step mother W, who is always plotting her downfall, and a step sister X, who empathizes with R and goes against W. I don't know where, but somewhere in the middle of things there are two antisocial elements, Y and Z, trying to kill someone or the other. Somehow, just somehow, they always fail to do their job and are promptly excused every SINGLE time.

Now you would want to know why R has a step mother and what happened to her father. But as you may have noticed, I have run out of the English alphabet! Probably next time I will try to rewrite this post with Tamil alphabet. I can create 247 characters that way. Now you tell me, which part of the story did you not understand?

Here is where the confusion simply explodes, the same A to Z appear in different roles every 30 minutes. Somebody's wife in this serial becomes his sister in the some other. Two guys fighting over a same girl from 6:30 to 7:00 become business partners from 7:30 to 8:00. For all the doubts I have ever asked my Mom regarding the Tamil serial, she has had a standard reply, "Adhu vera serial da". I guess all is well until she throws tea at my face. Oh yeah, enjoy the insanity until it lasts...

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

I started this blog because I wanted a space to express my ideas and make fun of my life. Eventually I fell in love with writing and this blog has been alive for almost 3 years now. But, as it is well documented in this blog itself, the love has been anything but constant. Even after repeated vows to blog regularly, I disappear into periods of emptiness. There would be 3 posts in draft mode, but I won't find a single word more to write! It is technically called a Writers block, but it is basically a lack of love. Now, will the same phenomenon happen when I am in love with a person as well? I don't know. There will be days, a lot many of them, when you feel like your better half means the world to you. But, will there be days when you realize that the world is majorly made of mud, dust, pollution and non-potable water? Being the engineer that I am, I cannot resist the temptation to ask this question.

Can love also be reduced to an equation, Love (t) = fn (t, 1/t, Sin t, Cos t), with 't' being the time variable?

Don't think my idea is outrageous. If numbers are allowed to be irrational, then why not this? Just imagine the possibilities. For a start, you can differentiate the equation and figure out the slope of your love curve! You will know when your love will maximise or minimise and you can act accordingly. You can integrate the equation between two time frames and find out exactly how much you will love a given person, correct to two decimal places. How simple would setting priorities become now? Excel will help you choose between marriage and career.

It does not come without a catch though. Mathematicians have a concept called 'indeterminable'. You can have an equation describing a quantity, but you cannot determine it. Mathematicians are cool, like that. What if we figure out the equation for love and then realize love, and therefore God, is indeterminable. I would rather prefer my God to be indeterminable. How about you?

An economist would agree that reality is not always morality. Even today, scientists around the world are talking about mapping a human being's past in terms of spatial and time coordinates (x, y, z & t). Their idea is, once you can zero down on a person's past through an equation, you can extrapolate that equation to determine his future. The only major problem they are facing is that the equation determining a person's past will change with every passing second and this will affect his future in a significant way. If they can find a way around it, astrology will simply be reduced to another excel sheet circulated in forward mails. Will humans ever get there? My guess is that God will let humans reach there and immediately press the 'self destruct' button for planet Earth. There is no plausible and logical counter to this argument. Will we get there in 2012? Give me a break...

Friday, December 3, 2010

I am told that everything happens for a reason and I could learn something worthwhile out of every painful situation. Currently, I have no idea about any of those stuff concerning my life. I request you to kindly let me know if there is something I need to know but failed to pick up.

I very well know you are not going to reply back through a comment on my blog. But now that I have told you, this becomes your problem, not mine.

Anticipating a favourable response from you.

Thanks and regardsVasanth Kumar KYou know the crap that usually goes here after my name.

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Somebody once asked me why I am generally happier than the typical happy person around. I told her (or him, I just guessed guys won't ask me such questions) that is because I am greatly amused and amazed by the ways of the world and the world never ceases to interest me. One of the main reasons I am constantly amused is because, I think, in an acceptedly slightly crazy manner. These are not thoughts that will guide the course of next generation economy or solve global warming, these are simply useless thoughts.They don't serve any tangible purpose, nevertheless they are true! When I get a surging bout of creativity (aka craziness), I try to put it down on my blog. Reason 1, it gets documented for future generations to look up. Reason 2, it causes minimum damage, as only a statistically negligible percentage of humanity will ever stumble upon my blog. Now for the craziness, I mean, creativity...

When I was useless browsing the internet (I also usefully browse the internet), I stumbled upon a profession called 'creative writer'. Instantly there was a short circuit in my gray matter. Whenever some one writes, they create something, isn't it? It could be opinions, views, critique, novels, love letters or even shopping lists. They are creating something. So by definition of the process, anyone who ever wrote anything was a creative writer, isn't it? If someone is not creating something through their writing, they must be called copywriters. But doesn't copywriter mean something else? Here I am not debating upon the usefulness of the writing. On that basis, may be we can classify them as useful and useless writers. But that is a post for another day. Now, creating content and copying from others' content are all inclusive and mutually exclusive groups. In other words, if someone isn't creating content, they are copying it and vice versa. So creative writers and copywriters can very well be used to categorize all those people who write. Then for what do we use the word 'writer'? Is it a superset? Anyone?

Quite recently, I migrated my mobile number from a prepaid account to a postpaid account. Two hours after I had submitted the application, my coworker suddenly turned towards me. With a shocked expression on his face he said, "There is a buzzing sound coming from inside your head!". Yes, the damn thing inside was thinking. Again, prepaid and postpaid are two all inclusive, mutually exclusive categories. By conventional definition or by common perception, prepaid is when you pay before you use the service and postpaid is the other way around. Consider this, when the time reads 'post meridiem', it means after meridiem right? When your coworker says we will meet 'post lunch', you meet after lunch right? You also know what post mortem and post production mean right? By means of derived conclusion, 'post paid' means after the payment has been made right? No wait, that is prepaid!

Between the world and me, one of us is definitely crazy. I am just wondering which one!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

No comments, this is what you say when you don't want to say whatever it is that you intend to say but want the listener to know what you are saying is not what you wanted to say. Alternatively, it is also what you say when you have absolutely no clue as to what you are supposed to say! Sometimes, it can be both. Sadly, this was not accepted as a valid answer to any of the questions in any of the (in)competitive exams in any phase of my life. Understandably so. Imagine a professor setting up a case study for a question paper - He googles and googles, scroughes through tons of pages in the internet, picks an esoteric case, translates it from Spanish (or Greek, or Latin, or Tamil) to English, spices it up with some numbers, (in an attempt to make it more difficult for geniuses like me to pass) draws up his own conclusions and just says, comment. In the answer sheet I write,

7. b) No comments!(fyi, this is a 15 mark question!)

I would have been long dead by now. Hey, do they have blogging in Hell? Not that I will end up in hell, I am just assuming they would have everything in Heaven (including Silk Smitha). Ah, crap! I do it again. Ever since I started this blog, I have made it a point to digress everytime I start to write. And you have been reading all these! I guess it has been a scientific art to keep this blog running and I am compelled to write a blog about it. Crap, digression again. Enough of it. Now I will get to my point. Everything you read from this point below has the breathtaking potential to miraculously waste 15 minutes of your life. Promise.

The primary purpose of this blog entry is to answer the quintessential question right at the center of the need for this blog's survival - Why don't people comment on my blog? It has become a serious concern. Let us talk numbers, take a look at the number of comments registered on my 3 latest blog posts - 8, 4, 1. Power series of 2 written backwards. Statistics would suggest the number of comments on this post would be 0.5. Seriously, God, why me?

Is it because nobody reads my blog? Couldn't be so... See, you are reading it. Gotcha! "If somebody is jobless enough to write crap, there is some-(more)-body else to enjoy reading that crap", once said Albert Einstein. Apparently that is how the Universe is designed. Promise. There are plenty of people who regularly tell me personally on gtalk that my last post was awesome. Are they cheating? Could be, they are my friends after all! I don't beleive in showing off by putting up visitor counters on my blog. I also don't believe the spelling of 'believe' is correct in the previous sentence. Obviously, it is the quality of readers that matters, not the quantity, no?

After careful, painstakingly detailled and horrendously boring analysis, I conclude Google might be the reason for the reduced comment traffic on my blog. They invented the Google reader. (No, I think they bought it from someone else, but that doesn't matter to this discussion). Everybody reads the unmatchable delivery of my hitherto unheard of intellect in their google readers and goes home. They don't come to my blog to comment. For the technically unequipped, it is similar to staying 1000 miles away from someone, calling them on phone and saying, 'I am still your boy friend!' You know, technology. Actually, I think this reason can be true. But I am not alone in this. Even the Hindu and the Times are battling to somehow get people to buy their newspapers. I just want you to leave lame comments on my blog.

From now on, if there are not enough comments on my blog, I will stop writing. Promise.

Alright... Regardless of whether you comment or not, I will write crap and you will read it. If you comment, I will write better crap. Comment and be a part of this legend of a blog. Offer valid only till stocks last. Conditions apply...

Cheers!

P.S - I know what comes to your mind after reading this blog entry. This has been conveniently titled to remind you that!

This is me

Antithesis. The highest degree of complexity in it's most simplified form.
Add up all the oxymorons you know and you get me!
I write to express my thoughts. Nothing else. I am a wasted genius (B.Tech) and a celebrity in the making (MBA). Both degrees influence my writing to various degrees!